Tom Brown\'s Schooldays

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TOM BROWN'S SCHOOLDAYS

By Thomas Hughes




PART I.



CHAPTER I--THE BROWN FAMILY

"I'm the Poet of White Horse Vale, sir,
With liberal notions under my cap."--Ballad

The Browns have become illustrious by the pen of Thackeray and the
pencil of Doyle, within the memory of the young gentlemen who are now
matriculating at the universities. Notwithstanding the well-merited but
late fame which has now fallen upon them, any one at all acquainted with
the family must feel that much has yet to be written and said before the
British nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it
owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way,
they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving
their mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever the
fleets and armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the
Browns have done yeomen's work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft at
Cressy and Agincourt--with the brown bill and pike under the brave
Lord Willoughby--with culverin and demi-culverin against Spaniards and
Dutchmen--with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket and bayonet, under
Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they
have carried their lives in their hands, getting hard knocks and hard
work in plenty--which was on the whole what they looked for, and the
best thing for them--and little praise or pudding, which indeed they,
and most of us, are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs,
and such-like folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but
those noble families would be somewhat astounded--if the accounts ever
came to be fairly taken--to find how small their work for England has
been by the side of that of the Browns.

These latter, indeed, have, until the present generation, rarely been
sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. They have wanted their sacer vates,
having been too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not having
been largely gifted with the talent of catching hold of, and holding on
tight to, whatever good things happened to be going--the foundation of
the fortunes of so many noble families. But the world goes on its way,
and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the Browns, like other wrongs,
seem in a fair way to get righted. And this present writer, having for
many years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and, moreover,
having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently
respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in
him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile.

However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you
should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so
bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet and put
up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear
at once what sort of folk the Browns are--at least my branch of them;
and then, if you don't like the sort, why, cut the concern at once, and
let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other.

In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question
their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no
question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are
going; there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcass.
And these carcasses, for the most part, answer very well to the
characteristic propensity: they are a squareheaded and snake-necked
generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in
the flank, carrying no lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as
Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another.
With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth
generation. "Blood is thicker than water," is one of their pet sayings.
They can't be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never
were such people for family gatherings; which, were you a stranger, or
sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together.
For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in
telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their
minds are wonderfully antagonistic, and all their opinions are downright
beliefs. Till you've been among them some time and understand them, you
can't think but that they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it. They love
and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family
arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy, another to his chambers,
and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever
convinced that the Browns are the height of company.

This family training, too, combined with their turn for combativeness,
makes them eminently quixotic. They can't let anything alone which they
think going wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoying all
easy-going folk, and spend their time and money in having a tinker at
it, however hopeless the job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave
the most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a stile. Most other
folk get tired of such work. The old Browns, with red faces, white
whiskers, and bald heads, go on believing and fighting to a green old
age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old man with the scythe
reaps and garners them away for troublesome old boys as they are.

And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make
them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in
the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back
feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one
week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he
goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they
will be on the lookout for Bill to take his place.

However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular;
so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole
empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take
to be the chief cause of that empire's stability; let us at once fix our
attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched,
and which dwelt in that portion of the royal county of Berks which is
called the Vale of White Horse.

Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as
far as Swindon. Those of you who did so with their eyes open have been
aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a fine range of chalk
hills running parallel with the railway on the left-hand side as you go
down, and distant some two or three miles, more or less, from the line.
The highest point in the range is the White Horse Hill, which you come
in front of just before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you love
English scenery, and have a few hours to spare, you can't do better,
the next time you pass, than stop at the Farringdon Road or Shrivenham
station, and make your way to that highest point. And those who care for
the vague old stories that haunt country-sides all about England, will
not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay; for,
glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting
for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods
thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough
of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. I believe
this to be the case almost throughout the country, but each has a
special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of
and going to introduce you to very particularly, for on this subject I
must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in detail may skip
the chapter.

O young England! young England! you who are born into these racing
railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight,
every year, and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground
for three pound ten in a five-weeks' holiday, why don't you know more of
your own birthplaces? You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems to
me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for
midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not--going round Ireland,
with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson
on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford
racing boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the
steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by
the last batch of books from Mudie's library, and half bored to death.
Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or
less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and
have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high
art, and all that; have seen the pictures of Dresden and the Louvre,
and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own
lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be choke-full of science, not
one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis,
which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the
bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends,
the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last
skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood,
where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid
by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether.

Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at
the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had
been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce Domum" at the top
of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We
had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And
so we got to know all the country folk and their ways and songs and
stories by heart, and went over the fields and woods and hills, again
and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or
Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you're young cosmopolites,
belonging to all countries and no countries. No doubt it's all right; I
dare say it is. This is the day of large views, and glorious humanity,
and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of
White Horse, and that that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away
Alfred's Hill to make an embankment.

But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the country in which the
first scenes of this true and interesting story are laid. As I said, the
Great Western now runs right through it, and it is a land of large, rich
pastures bounded by ox-fences, and covered with fine hedgerow timber,
with here and there a nice little gorse or spinney, where abideth poor
Charley, having no other cover to which to betake himself for miles and
miles, when pushed out some fine November morning by the old Berkshire.
Those who have been there, and well mounted, only know how he and the
stanch little pack who dash after him--heads high and sterns low, with
a breast-high scent--can consume the ground at such times. There being
little ploughland, and few woods, the Vale is only an average sporting
country, except for hunting. The villages are straggling, queer,
old-fashioned places, the houses being dropped down without the least
regularity, in nooks and out-of-the-way corners, by the sides of shadowy
lanes and footpaths, each with its patch of garden. They are built
chiefly of good gray stone, and thatched; though I see that within the
last year or two the red-brick cottages are multiplying, for the Vale is
beginning to manufacture largely both bricks and tiles. There are lots
of waste ground by the side of the roads in every village, amounting
often to village greens, where feed the pigs and ganders of the people;
and these roads are old-fashioned, homely roads, very dirty and badly
made, and hardly endurable in winter, but still pleasant jog-trot roads
running through the great pasture-lands, dotted here and there with
little clumps of thorns, where the sleek kine are feeding, with no fence
on either side of them, and a gate at the end of each field, which makes
you get out of your gig (if you keep one), and gives you a chance of
looking about you every quarter of a mile.

One of the moralists whom we sat under in our youth--was it the great
Richard Swiveller, or Mr. Stiggins--says, "We are born in a vale, and
must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." These
consequences I, for one, am ready to encounter. I pity people who
weren't born in a vale. I don't mean a flat country; but a vale--that
is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having your hill always in view
if you choose to turn towards him--that's the essence of a vale. There
he is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion. You never
lose him as you do in hilly districts.

And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up
above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest,
bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the
top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder
and think it odd you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as
you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which
wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a
magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds,
all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left
it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see
eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or
fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to
overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on
all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to
your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There
is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies,
just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by
her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and
the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys
for the ordnance map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you
won't forget, a place to open a man's soul, and make him prophesy, as
he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord
before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind, and to the
right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along
which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the
Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest
back of the hills--such a place as Balak brought Balaam to, and told him
to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not,
neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.

And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on
the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for
Englishmen--more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones
lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his
great battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Aescendum" in the chroniclers),
which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The
Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing--the whole crown
of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher
ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from
London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair Vale, Alfred's
own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as
they did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the
lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree,
marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have
seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the
"single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day,
just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since--an
old single thorn-tree, "marvellous stumpy." At least, if it isn't the
same tree it ought to have been, for it's just in the place where the
battle must have been won or lost--"around which, as I was saying, the
two lines of foemen came together in battle with a huge shout. And in
this place one of the two kings of the heathen and five of his earls
fell down and died, and many thousands of the heathen side in the same
place." * After which crowning mercy, the pious king, that there might
never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the country-side, carved out
on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is
almost precipitous, the great Saxon White Horse, which he who will may
see from the railway, and which gives its name to the Vale, over which
it has looked these thousand years and more.

* "Pagani editiorem Iocum praeoccupaverant. Christiani ab
inferiori loco aciem dirigebant. Erat quoque in eodem loco
unica spinosa arbor, brevis admodum (quam nos ipsi nostris
propriis oculis vidimus). Circa quam ergo hostiles inter se
acies cum ingenti clamore hostiliter conveniunt. Quo in
loco alter de duobus Paganorum regibus et quinque comites
occisi occubuerunt, et multa millia Paganae partis in eodem
loco. Cecidit illic ergo Boegsceg Rex, et Sidroc ille senex
comes, et Sidroc Junior comes, et Obsbern comes," etc.--
Annales Rerum Gestarum AElfredi Magni, Auctore Asserio.
Recensuit Franciscus Wise. Oxford, 1722, p.23.

Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gully
called "the Manger," into one side of which the hills fall with a series
of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs." They
are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere
else, with their short green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer
and thistle-down gleaming in the sun and the sheep-paths running along
their sides like ruled lines.

The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon's Hill, a curious
little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range,
utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of
mankind--St. George, the country folk used to tell me--killed a dragon.
Whether it were St. George, I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed
there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more
by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside.

Passing along the Ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we come to a
little clump of young beech and firs, with a growth of thorn and privet
underwood. Here you may find nests of the strong down partridge and
peewit, but take care that the keeper isn't down upon you; and in the
middle of it is an old cromlech, a huge flat stone raised on seven or
eight others, and led up to by a path, with large single stones set up
on each side. This is Wayland Smith's cave, a place of classic fame now;
but as Sir Walter has touched it, I may as well let it alone, and refer
you to "Kenilworth" for the legend.

The thick, deep wood which you see in the hollow, about a mile off,
surrounds Ashdown Park, built by Inigo Jones. Four broad alleys are cut
through the wood from circumference to centre, and each leads to one
face of the house. The mystery of the downs hangs about house and wood,
as they stand there alone, so unlike all around, with the green slopes
studded with great stones just about this part, stretching away on all
sides. It was a wise Lord Craven, I think, who pitched his tent there.

Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to cultivated land.
The downs, strictly so called, are no more. Lincolnshire farmers have
been imported, and the long, fresh slopes are sheep-walks no more, but
grow famous turnips and barley. One of these improvers lives over there
at the "Seven Barrows" farm, another mystery of the great downs. There
are the barrows still, solemn and silent, like ships in the calm sea,
the sepulchres of some sons of men. But of whom? It is three miles from
the White Horse--too far for the slain of Ashdown to be buried there.
Who shall say what heroes are waiting there? But we must get down into
the Vale again, and so away by the Great Western Railway to town,
for time and the printer's devil press, and it is a terrible long and
slippery descent, and a shocking bad road. At the bottom, however, there
is a pleasant public; whereat we must really take a modest quencher, for
the down air is provocative of thirst. So we pull up under an old oak
which stands before the door.

"What is the name of your hill, landlord?"

"Blawing STWUN Hill, sir, to be sure."

[READER. "Stuym?"

AUTHOR: "Stone, stupid--the Blowing Stone."]

"And of your house? I can't make out the sign."

"Blawing Stwun, sir," says the landlord, pouring out his old ale from a
Toby Philpot jug, with a melodious crash, into the long-necked glass.

"What queer names!" say we, sighing at the end of our draught, and
holding out the glass to be replenished.

"Bean't queer at all, as I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back
our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun, his self," putting
his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high,
perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian
rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We
are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering
what will come next. "Like to hear un, sir?" says mine host, setting
down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We
are ready for anything; and he, without waiting for a reply, applies his
mouth to one of the ratholes. Something must come of it, if he doesn't
burst. Good heavens! I hope he has no apoplectic tendencies. Yes, here
it comes, sure enough, a gruesome sound between a moan and a roar, and
spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the
woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like, awful voice. "Um do say,
sir," says mine host, rising purple-faced, while the moan is still
coming out of the Stwun, "as they used in old times to warn the
country-side by blawing the Stwun when the enemy was a-comin', and as
how folks could make un heered then for seven mile round; leastways, so
I've heered Lawyer Smith say, and he knows a smart sight about them old
times." We can hardly swallow Lawyer Smith's seven miles; but could the
blowing of the stone have been a summons, a sort of sending the fiery
cross round the neighbourhood in the old times? What old times? Who
knows? We pay for our beer, and are thankful.

"And what's the name of the village just below, landlord?"

"Kingstone Lisle, sir."

"Fine plantations you've got here?"

"Yes, sir; the Squire's 'mazing fond of trees and such like."

"No wonder. He's got some real beauties to be fond of. Good-day,
landlord."

"Good-day, sir, and a pleasant ride to 'ee."

And now, my boys, you whom I want to get for readers, have you had
enough? Will you give in at once, and say you're convinced, and let me
begin my story, or will you have more of it? Remember, I've only been
over a little bit of the hillside yet--what you could ride round easily
on your ponies in an hour. I'm only just come down into the Vale, by
Blowing Stone Hill; and if I once begin about the Vale, what's to stop
me? You'll have to hear all about Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred, and
Farringdon, which held out so long for Charles the First (the Vale was
near Oxford, and dreadfully malignant--full of Throgmortons, Puseys,
and Pyes, and such like; and their brawny retainers). Did you ever read
Thomas Ingoldsby's "Legend of Hamilton Tighe"? If you haven't, you ought
to have. Well, Farringdon is where he lived, before he went to sea;
his real name was Hamden Pye, and the Pyes were the great folk at
Farringdon. Then there's Pusey. You've heard of the Pusey horn, which
King Canute gave to the Puseys of that day, and which the gallant old
squire, lately gone to his rest (whom Berkshire freeholders turned out
of last Parliament, to their eternal disgrace, for voting according to
his conscience), used to bring out on high days, holidays, and bonfire
nights. And the splendid old cross church at Uffington, the Uffingas
town. How the whole countryside teems with Saxon names and memories!
And the old moated grange at Compton, nestled close under the hillside,
where twenty Marianas may have lived, with its bright water-lilies
in the moat, and its yew walk, "the cloister walk," and its peerless
terraced gardens. There they all are, and twenty things beside, for
those who care about them, and have eyes. And these are the sort of
things you may find, I believe, every one of you, in any common English
country neighbourhood.

Will you look for them under your own noses, or will you not? Well,
well, I've done what I can to make you; and if you will go gadding over
half Europe now, every holidays, I can't help it. I was born and bred
a west-country man, thank God! a Wessex man, a citizen of the noblest
Saxon kingdom of Wessex, a regular "Angular Saxon," the very soul of me
adscriptus glebae. There's nothing like the old country-side for me,
and no music like the twang of the real old Saxon tongue, as one gets
it fresh from the veritable chaw in the White Horse Vale; and I say with
"Gaarge Ridler," the old west-country yeoman,--